the patient is beyond benefit from these post-mortem answers, and that fact raises the question: what is the point? I believe the point is that our mutual interconnectedness, our belonging to each other, enables these too-late-to-help answers to be of use to other people: to offer a deeper understanding of how an illness was affecting the person as death approached; to answer questions about the impact of previous treatments like surgery or radiotherapy; to give new insights into causes of symptoms that were hard to manage.
